


of Bones and Buttercups

by saltwatersweets



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: (also its my fic and i can do what i want. leave me alone), Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Good Brother Papyrus, Good Brother Sans, POV Second Person, Papyrus (Undertale) Knows More Than He Lets On, Post-Undertale Neutral Route - King Papyrus Ending, Sans (Undertale) Has Issues, Sans (Undertale) Remembers Resets, Self-Esteem Issues, Temporary Character Death, Undertale Spoilers, but i mean... come on... it's been five years. you know everything by now, does this ending count as unhappy? who knows, everyone else is just mentioned, flowey is only in one scene but he's there, font///cest shippers if you even LOOK at this fic then you're gonna have a bad time, i realize that sans canonically doesn't remember resets but its. its for the angst okay, papyrus tries his best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26290204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltwatersweets/pseuds/saltwatersweets
Summary: A human fell into the underground. Overnight, tens of monsters disappeared, along with the king and six human SOULs.The newly crowned king Papyrus and his brother, Sans, are left to pick up the pieces.
Relationships: Papyrus & Sans (Undertale)
Comments: 19
Kudos: 55





	of Bones and Buttercups

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday undertale! i can't BELIEVE it's been five entire years since this game came out. i wasn't into it then, i got into the fandom around 2017, but still. it feels like forever ago, and at the same time it feels like just yesterday i was watching a stronger than you parody with NO idea what was happening but hey! the music and animations were pretty! 
> 
> anyways, as fun as the pacifist/genocide runs are, i feel like the neutral runs are just as interesting! they don't get enough credit honestly. one of my favorites has always been the king papyrus ending, since it really shows us just how determined papyrus is to never give up. so many people use the disbelief papyrus au to say "oh look at papyrus he's all grown up" and i'm not hating on anyone's aus, but that au has always felt... wildly out of character to me. the king papyrus neutral ending is where we really see papyrus all grown up. he's not giving up on anyone, he's never giving up on anyone, but he's matured a lot and will continue to do everything he can to give the remaining monsters hope, while never straying from his ideals. THAT'S papyrus all grown up. 
> 
> (if you couldn't tell i have a lot of feelings about this neutral ending and papyrus in general ok)
> 
> anyways, i really hope i did both sans and papyrus justice (heh) in this story, since it's my first time writing for undertale! with that said, enjoy, and if you leave a compliment or a live reaction or even just a question (i love explaining my thought process while i was writing, for reasons unknown) then i will love you forever.
> 
> (also, i swear i tried for like thirty minutes to get the comic sans and papyrus fonts to work, but ao3 just never chooses to agree with me so then i gave up -_- so just imagine that their dialogue is in their respective fonts lmao)

you spend most of your time waiting for a reset.

well. no. that’s not completely the truth. you spend most of your time filling out paperwork, and reading paperwork, and making sure papyrus gets his bedtime story. when he was first elected as king (by order of elimination, really), you just sat around on your bed doing nothing for a week or so because what was the point? the kid was just gonna get tired and reset again, and you weren’t really the type to try to make progress for it to just be pulled apart like a loosely knitted sweater. but then papyrus was getting tired of handling all those responsibilities of kingship by himself and you just couldn’t let him do that so you took up the more technical side of being a ruler, while he instead put all his time and effort into making sure the monsters who were left didn’t lose hope. really, it’s probably a harder job than the one you’ve got, anyways.

but saying that you don’t anticipate a reset soon would be a lie. the knowledge that it’ll happen soon is always there, resting in the back of your mind. it’s bound to happen any day now, really. every morning you expect to wake up back in your messy snowdin room, and you instead blink open your eye sockets to find yourself in the new room in what was once asgore’s castle. you don’t think this place’ll ever feel familiar. 

you hadn’t wanted to touch anything in new home at first; despite the fact that whatever you did in this place wouldn’t matter in a while, this place felt… sacred, in a way. there were bedrooms here that you doubted were used in centuries. everything, from child’s drawings, to hand-made sweaters, to spotless family photos, is untouched. everyone knew what had happened to the king’s kids all those years ago. while you didn’t really like what the king had to do to get those souls, you didn’t really care. 

and. besides. it’s not like you’ll ever stay on the surface for more than a month before the kid gets bored and resets and you wake up to your familiar, dirty bedroom in snowdin. why should you care what happens to those souls anyway?

so. yeah. if you had lungs, you’d probably be waiting with baited breath to see when you’ll be thrust back into snowdin, which, for all its repetition, was nothing if not familiar.

🦴🦴🦴

it’s been around two months since papyrus officially became king.

you can still remember it, since it was something you actually put a little effort to pay attention to. no one had really known _how_ to crown someone. asgore had been king for most monsters’ whole lives, including yours, and old gerson in waterfall was probably one of the only monsters who even had a chance of remembering when asgore would have been made the king. even then, you were around fifty-seven percent sure that he became king mostly just through genetics.

but. anyways. 

the… ceremony? was that what it was called? was pretty awkward. you don’t think anyone really knew what to do. you had a general idea from those times that undyne or little old lady (toriel. that was her name. tori. despite the plenty of timelines where you’ve met her and learned her name, you can’t help but call her little old lady in your head.) or even mettaton became the new king-queen-tv-show-host-dictator-whatever, but you’re not really much help in this situation. it doesn’t matter. 

there was some kind of dog monster who wound up crowning papyrus as king at the coronation thing, and he kind of reminded you of the royal guard. but all the members of the royal guard had “disappeared” overnight, and you _really wondered_ why that was. the dog-fox guy (what was his name again? tony something? you’re sure it began with t) put the crown on your brother’s skull, said a few words, the rest of the monsters who were still alive asked papyrus a few questions. you sort of stopped paying attention around that point. 

days before the ceremony had even begun, papyrus had taken it upon himself to completely clean and pack up your guys’ whole house. he needed to do it anyway; as the new king, he was supposed to leave snowdin and move to the castle. he took it well (he takes everything well, everything with a smile on his face and his smile isn’t like yours it’s always _hopeful_ and kind and amazing), but you could tell he was still unhappy about leaving snowdin. 

(you were pretty sad about leaving too, really. for as long as you could remember, you and papyrus had lived in snowdin and done your best to make do with everything there. when you told the locals at grillby's that papyrus was leaving so of course you were leaving, drunk bunny, hiccuping with alcohol and sobs, hugged you for what must have been an hour, despite you saying that you would visit here plenty. after all, you had tons of shortcuts. you got it, though. after enough monsters were gone already, it must have felt like you were leavin them too. which. you were. you didn’t tell them how useless it was for you and them to feel sad, since you’d be back in snowdin _plenty_ soon.

you tried to tell tori that you were leaving. that you probably wouldn’t get to tell her as many jokes as usual. (that sure, you had kept your promise, you hadn’t so much as _touched_ the kid, but didn’t feel all that great about it.)

just like the past few weeks, the other side of door was silent.)

you don’t think you’d ever seen your house that bare. everything was just. in boxes. even when papyrus was (dust in the wind, you couldn’t save him, you can’t save _anyone_ why even _try_ he’s gone but you’re still here and the kid is still here too and wow isn't everything just so _pointless_ -) gone, it hadn’t felt like this. perhaps he had died enough times for you to get used to it. 

god. that’s an awful thought. 

you leave it behind, just like you leave the machine in your closet. you stopped trying to get that thing working _ages_ ago.

later that night, when you and papyrus were eating home cooked pasta, you had a Very Serious Question to ask him.

“hey, bro. i got a question for ya,” you said very seriously, your grin widening as you twirled a noodle around in an endless loop. 

he squinted at you, clearly suspicious. “WHAT IS IT, BROTHER?”

“how are you the ruler?” you said, then made a show of looking him up and down. it was rather difficult when both of you are sitting at the dinner table, but you made do. “i mean, i’m pretty sure you’re taller than twelve inches.”

it took a moment for him to connect the dots in his mind. when he did, he made a big show of it, and your grin grew. you could see him smiling, too, only it seemed to be more in gratefulness than amusement.

you chuckled. you’re kinda glad that, in this strange situation, you at least managed to bring some kind of familiarity to this place.

🦴🦴🦴

seventeen monsters in total fell down after the human left the underground.

everyone had been hopeless for a few weeks. some people’s family members had been killed, other people’s friends, someone’s classmate, a mentor, an acquaintance. while you could count the monsters who knew everyone in the underground on one hand, everyone, at the very least, knew _of_ someone who had disappeared. everyone knew about the undyne, everyone knew about mettaton, and. of course, everyone knew about the king. 

seventeen monsters in total fell down after the human left the underground.

in all honesty, you don’t blame them. you _can’t_ blame them. you know exactly how it feels to lose hope, your single hp just barely keeping you alive some days. 

you’re pretty sure that if papyrus had been killed with the others, you would have fallen down too.

you’re pretty sure that you _have_ fallen down before, back when it was just the flower doing this sort of stuff. 

they were right. death really was just like falling asleep.

when the first monster fell down a few days after everyone had gone missing, it sort of started a chain reaction. one would fall, then another two who knew the first, then four, than five, and it just kept _going_. it was like an endless cycle of death.

papyrus had panicked at first; you could see it in his eyes (well, you would have, if he, y’know, had any). still, though, he refused to give up on hope, and refused to let others give up as well. he had always been great like that, you can’t think of a single time he had given up on anything or anyone. 

even then, even with his endless optimism, you could tell that he had been pretty _rattled._ papyrus had decided that anyone who fell down could stay in one of the many rooms of new home, along with their families. there wasn’t really a way to directly bring them back, not with alphys gone, but at the very least they could be given some comfort in the last few weeks before they were gone. 

then, some of them started to wake up. 

not all of them, most of them did turn into dust. but. some did wake up. 

the first looked vaguely familiar, you’d probably seen them running through waterfall sometime or another. their lack of arms was hard to forget. they liked undyne, didn’t they? you’re pretty sure they had really admired her, which admittedly was normal for most of the kids in the underground. most kids and papyrus.

the second one you recognized, despite never actually meeting them. tori, on occasion, had told you about some of the monsters in the ruins. only one of them actually was able to come and go - a ghost who, when you looked at them, was somehow taller than you, because of course they were. you’re pretty sure it was that one monster’s - the one who enjoyed singing, with the crowd and the kid and the tickets you sometimes made out of toilet paper - doing that got them to wake up. she hadn’t left their side in the few weeks they’d been just lying there. she must have passed her desperation onto him. not her hope, though; you’re pretty sure she was one bad day away from falling down herself.

there were one or two more than that, but none that you would know. once some of the fallen down monsters began to wake up, less and less fell down in the first place. by the time four months had passed, no more monsters fell down. it was… nice. it was nice.

🦴🦴🦴

you still can’t tell papyrus about his friends. you wonder if you ever will, or if you’ll just leave him to figure it out for himself. (you wonder what would be crueler.)

it’s not that you don’t want to tell him, you just can’t. you’ve formed a web of lies that just gets stretched out more and more until the entire thing is so delicate a breeze could ruin it completely. you don’t think he could ever give up hope on a situation, he never has, but you cannot take that chance.

the monsters need him to be strong. if he gives up, then there really is no hope for them. they need him.

(you need him.)

you lay in your bed sometimes and think that you are horrible.

🦴🦴🦴

you _really_ should have given king fluffybuns more credit as king.

you’d never expected it to be this… hard. you’re glad you’ve got the easier job, still; doing paperwork and making sure that everything is running smoothly is a _lot_ simpler than trying to keep an entire race of people from giving up. that was something that papyrus was suited for, not you. all you can do is crack a few jokes. along with being there for papyrus, it’s all you’re good for.

but this? this is hard. you can tell papyrus is proud of you, in some type of way, but after the first few months pride shifted over to clear worry. you’d care more if you had the time.

you don’t really have time to do much of anything these days.

everything is so much harder than you thought it would be. you’re not like these other monsters, you have no reason to grieve the souls lost. and, yet, you bury any semblance of sadness in your work anyway. 

when you’re not working, you’re sleeping. unfortunately, being assistant to the king (was that what you were? you didn’t really know what sort of title you had. you’d tried out “prince” in your head once, and the thought itself sounded wrong) forced you to have to give up your precious hot dog stand. those poor kids will now never know the joy of having to balance a water sausage on their heads. 

you also had to quit as a sentry, which. wasn’t really you quitting. it was more like a promotion, especially considering the fact that there was no royal guard anymore. y’know. because the kid killed them all? heh. 

when you only have one job, turns out it means you only have half of the legally required breaks you had before the king disappeared. bummer. it was nice having two breaks. but, it doesn’t really matter. you don’t use your breaks now anyway. there’s too much work to do.

god. you never want to have that thought again. working, still, sounds exhausting.

 _everything_ sounds exhausting.

sometimes, you really wonder what the hell could be so interesting on the surface that it’s taken the kid this long to reset.

🦴🦴🦴

you miss them sometimes.

tori. alphys. undyne. hell, you even miss the king, despite never really knowing the guy. you miss when they were here, imperfect but _here._

you miss when you would tell alphys science puns and she would groan at you but would occasionally tell one to you and show that she was not so above it all. you miss when papyrus would hang out at undyne’s and wouldn’t shut up about how cool and amazing and great she is, and how happy you had felt because she was probably his first friend. you miss telling knock knock jokes to some lady behind a door that seemed to be ten times your size, because it was so nice to have an audience, to have a fresh faceless monster you could talk to. you miss when the king was around to make sure things were running smoothly, when the other monsters in the underground didn’t feel as hopeless as you always did.

you can tell papyrus misses them too.

it takes him eight months to figure it out.

well. no. that’s not completely the truth, at least, you don’t think so. he probably found out a few weeks ago. he’s always been more observant than anyone has given him credit for, you know that. you knew it was only a matter of time before all those excuses and stories and lies about the others being on some secret vacation without ever saying goodbye caught up to you. you knew this would happen, you just could not accept it.

“SANS… MY FRIENDS… ARE NOT ON VACATION, ARE THEY?”

what you were reading drops heavily onto the table.

is he in your room? he is in your room. he’s staring at you with an expression in his eyes that looks like a mixture of pain and sorrow and hurt. but there is no anger there. there should be anger there.

“what? yeah, they are. it’s just a long one, bro. i mean, you’ve seen me whenever i get the chance to take a break, right?”

you lie a lot.

this is not something new to you at all. it is just a fact of life. birds sing. flowers bloom. you lie. it’s just something you do a lot. you’re a liar.

“SANS.”

but. just sometimes. you’re not a very good one.

you can’t hide it anymore. you can’t do _anything_ anymore. heh. _‘anymore’,_ you say, as if you could ever do anything in the first place. you can’t even talk. you stay silent as, for the first time, he is the judge. 

“BROTHER, PLEASE. TELL ME THE TRUTH.”

he already knows, he’s probably known for a while, why’s he gotta make you say it? you stare at the ground.

it feels like forever passes before you speak. the more logical part of you thinks it was probably only a second or two.

“...no.” you say, and you can’t even look him in the eyes as you tell him that his friends are dead and you’ve been lying to him about it for _months._ “no. they’re not… they aren’t on vacation, paps.”

you finally look up. you wish you didn’t. you can see him clearly; you can see how, despite the fact that he likely has known for a while, he was probably hoping that it wasn’t true. he was always like that. he always had more hope than anyone else.

“OKAY.” he says, and it’s probably the closest thing to a whisper you’ve ever heard from him. “OKAY.”

for a moment, there is nothing. just you two, looking at each other, able to do absolutely nothing.

then he opens his arms.

god. he’s trying to offer you a hug. why should he be trying to offer you a hug? you sure as hell don’t deserve one, you’ve never deserved him and you don’t think you ever will. no one will.

but. then you look at him. _really_ look at him. and you see he’s not really doing this for you.

a part of him is, you know that. in fact, you’re sure a lot of him is doing this for you. but anyone can see that he wants a hug too.

if you can do nothing else, you can do this.

you step forward, eyes fixed on the ground, as you walk right into him. his arms instantly wrap around you, tightly, as if afraid you’ll fall apart if he does not hold you. as if afraid _he’ll_ fall apart if he does not hold you. you raise your arms and hug him. his embrace around you does not falter; if anything, it only grows more warm.

your hands grip his cape, which still feels unfamiliar. how many times have you hugged him in the past month? in the past _eight_ months? not enough. never enough, you think, you're never enough, as your fingers tremble while you hold him and your legs grow shaky. you’re going to collapse. you can’t do that. you have to be there for him. no matter what had ever happened you two were always there for each other.

you think he is shaking too, though he does a better job hiding it. you don’t want him to hide it. you want him to talk to you, so he can be happy. 

“I MISS THEM.” he says, and his voice is the furthest thing from happy. 

"i know. i’m sorry.” you are. you don’t lie about that. “god, i’m… ‘m so sorry, paps-”

“I MISS YOU TOO.” he says, despite the fact that you are not dead like his friends are, and you can’t remember a single time that the kid even fought you, and you can only remember the flower getting a hit on you one or two times in total. “I MISS YOU, SANS. I MISS TALKING TO YOU AND YOU BEING TOO MUCH OF A LAZYBONES TO EVER PICK UP YOUR SOCK AND HEARING A TROMBONE AT RANDOM AND YOUR HORRIBLE JOKES AND- AND- AND…”

you haven’t been a very good brother. 

oh sure, you’ve helped with paperwork. you’ve read things so he didn’t have to, because his mind didn’t work the same way yours did, and you knew that better than anyone. you've hidden things you thought he'd be better off not knowing, so at least he could have hope and not think that all of this would just be reset any second now. 

but, you haven’t been there for him. 

you haven’t really been there at all. 

you hug him tighter. “i’m sorry. i’m sorry.” you hate making promises. “i promise, i'll be better-”

“I DON’T WANT YOU TO BE _BETTER_.” he says, firmly, but not unkindly. you don’t think he could ever be unkind in his life. “I WANT YOU TO BE _HAPPY.”_

well. he wants you to be happy and you want him to be happy. great. 

“SANS, I-” he begins, and starts to get up. you want to reach out to him helplessly like a child, but you do not. “I DON’T WANT YOU TO WORK YOURSELF SO HARD YOU CAN BARELY STAND WITHOUT FALLING. I DON’T WANT YOU TO SKIP OUT ON MEALTIMES OR STAY IN YOUR ROOM ALL DAY. I WANT YOU… I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY, SANS. YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO FEEL AS THOUGH YOU MUST CARRY THIS ALONE, BROTHER.”

you don’t get it. you could never get it; he loves you so much, and you both know it. how can he care this much about someone who's barely worth nothin'. you chuckle a bit. you hate making promises, sure, but you can’t say no to him. not to paps. “well, i guess i have been working myself down to the _bone.”_

“UGH.” he groans, but smiles, and you grin. really grin. he picks you up underneath his arm like you weigh nothing. “COME ON, SANS. I’LL MAKE SPAGHETTI FOR DINNER TONIGHT.” he pauses at your pause. "PLEASE."

you can't say no to him.

dinner with paps is the first sense of normality you’ve had in months. you can’t help but think his spaghetti tastes better than it used to. you joke about how he must have been replaced by an im- _pasta_ for it to taste this good. he moans, much louder.

you wonder just what you had done in some other lifetime for you to get a brother like him.

🦴🦴🦴

you met the flower today.

really, you should have expected that. you should be grateful, in fact, that it took so long to see him again. it’s been over a year since the kid left, hasn’t it? but, you didn’t really think the flower was even alive at this point.

you wonder why frisk spared flowey when there were so many other monsters they could've spared that they didn't.

you wonder why the flower hasn’t killed anyone since the kid left.

you ask him, and to your surprise, he actually tells you. you guess that he probably didn’t see the point in not tellin' you. 

apparently since the kid first fell into the underground, he couldn’t save or reset anymore, since their determination was greater than his. if he couldn’t reset, then killing everyone would just be useless, especially since there’d be no way for him to escape the underground without a human or monster soul to absorb. so, here he is, curiously watching everyone and seeing how things play out. 

he hasn’t been talking as much with papyrus. your brother hasn’t really had much time for that sort of thing, especially when there are so many monsters that still need him. if you didn’t know him better, you’d think the flower was almost _sad_ when he mentioned how busy you two were. knowing him, he’d probably just want him around for the entertainment value.

he was the last one to see the kid before they left. you ask him when they’re coming back.

anyone else would have been confused. why would the human return to the underground, when they had been threatened and had killed so many times? but you both know what you're talking about.

 _I don’t think they’re_ coming _back._ he says, with a roll of his eyes. _It’s been a while, hasn’t it? So now we’re all just left to deal with all this dust._ his face morphs into something disgustingly, joyfully mocking, despite the hidden disappointment lacing his words. _You should have seen her face when they killed her, how despite everything she wanted them to keep going, how_ hopeful _she was-_

you shortcut out of the king’s old garden, right back into your room.

🦴🦴🦴

you spend most of your time waiting for a reset.

you don’t think you’ll ever stop. and. well. you’re not really okay with that, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so there’s no real use _trying_ to do anything about it. you learned that a while ago. 

but… you don’t really think a reset is coming.

you’ll never stop waiting for one, but… you can’t remember a time when it’s been this long without you waking up to your familiar, dirty bedroom in snowdin. it’s been, what, a year since the kid left? a year and a half? you’re pretty certain that the surface is plenty more interesting than the underground, but they’ve always come back by now. 

you can’t remember the last time you haven’t been expecting a reset. for years, now, you’ve just… given up. on progress. on moving on. on everything.

it’s. terrifying. the idea that things might matter here. the thought that things might matter at all is so... _new._

but. 

but it’s. it’s sort of nice at the same time?

papyrus is here. there have been a good few times where you have walked through town to find papyrus’s scarf lying in the snow and gone home and stayed home until the kid made it to the judgement hall. those were always the worst timelines. you’ve lost count of how many times he’s died before - whether it be to the human or the flower - which is impossible anyway since you didn’t really bother to count in the first place.

some of the others are still gone. you aren’t happy about that. you weren’t really close to anyone from snowdin, but you still liked the people there. and you do miss them, just like you miss everyone else. 

but, it’s not the worst timeline it could be.

papyrus is here. he’s, for the most part, happy. in the past few months, people have finally begun gaining hope again. it’s… kinda nice. it almost makes you want to hope too.

if it stayed like this, without anymore resets, you don’t think you’d be too upset. it's certainly not a perfect ending for anyone, but. you could live like this. with papyrus here, safe and happy, both of you safe and happy, you could live like this.

🦴🦴🦴

  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


you wake up to your familiar, dirty bedroom in snowdin.

**Author's Note:**

> oops. my hand slipped.


End file.
